I love cookbooks. I’m a sucker for paging through them and trying to imagine how difficult recipes will be and what they will taste like. Some authors, like J. Kenji López-Alt and Deb Perelman, are ...

Cookbooks are a lot like Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games. They contain seemingly rigid rules that, in practice, require a certain amount of adaptation for your own tastes. So how come ...